Hillel Neuer: The Advocate of Truth at the U.N.

“Faced with compelling reports from around the world, of torture, persecution and violence against women, what has this council pronounced, what has it decided? Nothing. Its response has been silence.”

This is what Hillel Neuer sounds like, when he talks in front of the so-called United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which was basically hijacked by human rights abusers, meaning that U.N. body is being run by regimes which deny human rights to minorities or to women, or both, dictators who deny those rights to their entire populations.

Neuer does not hide the truth behind flowery formulations. He does not give in to the contradictions, the make-believe, and the lies at the United Nations. The exact opposite is the case: He is one of the main advocates of truth.

He is the one who keeps on spelling it out, including the fact that the UNHRC, dominated by Arab regimes, has adopted more resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined.

This means the U.N. body is largely ignoring Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, where human rights do not count at all. But hating Israel, the only Jewish state on the face of the Earth, which is the only democracy in the region, is high on the UNHRC’s agenda.

Before President Trump’s U.N. Ambassador Nikky Hailey was finally appointed, Hillel Neuer was almost alone. He was, and still is, the one who does not keep his mouth shut and who does not give in.

When he has to blast the UNHRC, he does. But he also messes with countries like France or Sweden, if necessary. After the United States announced they would leave UNESCO, he attacked Paris: “France has voted against Israel even more than Russia, more than Hugo Chevez did, more than Syria”, Neuer said in a television interview.

“So countries like France or Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström bear direct responsibility for helping destroy this agency.” Minister Wallström is one of the high-ranking European politicians who keeps on blasting Israel for things the country does not do.

Like the UNHRC, UNESCO has been bullying Israel for a long time. As Hillel Neuer’s NGO U.N. Watch has pointed out more than once, UNESCO “is betraying its mission to protect world heritage and culture.”

Between 2009 and 2014, UNESCO adopted as many as 46 resolutions against Israel, one on Syria, and none on Iran, Sudan, North Korea or any other country in the world. At the same time, this agency “repeatedly denies the ancient Jewish heritage and culture of the holy cities Jerusalem and Hebron, which was this year declared a World Heritage site of ‘Palestine'”, U.N. Watch says.

Under its Executive Director Hillel Neuer, U.N. Watch does not only uncover the most radical anti-Israel bias, which is really antisemitism, in U.N. bodies. The NGO also has diplomats fired who spread antisemitic propaganda and take pro-terror positions in official reports or speeches.

The list of scandals of this kind, which Hillel Neuer has uncovered, criticized, talked and written about is almost endless. Just some examples:

At UNRWA, yet another U.N. organization, which is supposed to help the so-called Palestinian refugees, several teachers employed by UNRWA schools in Gaza kept on posting pro-terror statements on Facebook. Neuer made sure the world noticed.

The U.N. Women’s Rights Commission condemned Israel as the world’s only violator of women’s rights. Real abusers of women’s rights, such as Iran, Yemen, and Afghanistan, were ignored. The next moment, U.N. Watch exposed the U.N.’s election of Saudi Arabia to this same commission, and the fact that at least five EU states voted for the Saudis.

Last year, 16 U.N. agencies signed an agreement with the non-existing “State of Palestine” to spend “an unprecedented 18 million Dollars to fund lawfare attacks on Israel, couched in the language of human rights, international law and ‘accountability'”. UN Watch exposed this scandal too.

In October of 2017, the U.N.’s Palestine Rapporteur Michael Lynk issued a report advocating an economic boycott of Israeli companies. “When Lynk arrived at U.N. headquarters in New York for his annual press conference, he was startled when three different journalists challenged him over his biased report and mandate”, U.N. Watch says. “The reporters were prompted by U.N. Watch’s complaint letter to the Secretary-General.”

When the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) singled out Israel as the only violator in the world of “mental, physical and environmental health”, Hillel Neuer was there to expose yet another scandal based on the wide-spread antisemitism at the U.N..

The same applied when Dubravka Simonovic, the U.N.’s “expert on violence against women”, visited Israel and the territories and concluded: “When Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault.” Or when the U.N. General Assembly adopted 21 one-sided resolutions against Israel. Most European countries voted against Israel in several cases.

Neuer and his NGO also exposed the following scandal: In 2017, UNRWA launched a campaign which involved a photo of a little girl in a bombed-out building. They called her “Aya from Gaza”. But the photo was actually taken in Syria. UNRWA had to remove that global campaign.

One thing is certain: Hillel Neuer is needed, now more than ever. The avalanche of anti-Israeli rhetoric, bias and propaganda has not receded. Actually, the exact opposite is the case.

“Most people around the world consider the United Nations to be credible”, Neuer recently said. Most people in Europe and North America assumed that U.N. diplomats took their decisions “on the basis of the facts, logic and morality”.

The question whether Israel should even be part of the U.N., in spite of being bullied and suffering attacks on its legitimacy, is more of a yes than a no, Neuer believes: “Israel should be there to make its case”, he told J-TV. “Walking away doesn’t really solve the problem.”

Most recently, in August of 2018, Hillel Neuer and his organization sparked a firestorm over the problematic ties of the new U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet with Latin America’s human rights abusing dictatorships, including Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Hillel Neuer is 47 years old, a Canadian citizen, a lawyer and an expatriate in Geneva, Switzerland. As a law clerk, he worked at the Supreme Court of Israel, before concentrating on human rights. To him it is not all about Israel. At the infamous UNHRC, he has fought for rape victims from the Darfur region, political prisoners in Cuba and victims of many other dictatorships.

The more scandals and bias he uncovers, the more he is being loved, but hated too.